Fool’s stories

This started a couple weeks ago when I had a dream.  In this dream, a giant dog was destroying cities.  By giant, I mean this dog could have easily chewed up Godzilla.  All of our guns and bombs were useless against it.  But then, this old guy from a retirement home stepped up and wrestled it into submission, or maybe killed it.  This turned out to be an immortal Gilgamesh, who had just been laying low for the last few thousand years.

I woke up, and in my semi-wakeful grogginess, I thought it would make a perfect story.  I did notice the issue that Gilgamesh didn’t become immortal in his Epic, but figured he just didn’t want to have to deal with everyone bugging him on how to be immortal, so the version of the story he told was that he didn’t become immortal.  I then tried to go back to sleep.

Later, after I had gotten up, I remembered this idea for a story.  But being fully awake, I started finding flaws in the idea.  Like, where did this enormous dog come from?  Even if Gilgamesh was immortal, how did he have the strength to wrestle this million-ton dog?  And how could someone like Gilgamesh just lay low for thousands of years?

This kind of thing happens to me a couple of times a month.  I’ll wake from a weird dream thinking it’ll make a great story, only to realize once I’ve woken up that it doesn’t even make sense as a dream.  And I wondered if there was a term for this … situation.  After some thought, I came up with Fool’s Stories, as in things that look like stories, only to realize they’re not.  Like how Pyrite is sometimes called Fool’s Gold.  Or, should they be called PyWrites?

Anyway, does this ever happen to you, and if so, what do you call it?

Free story idea – Four quick ideas for TV series

I have a lot of ideas for stories.  Like, if I wrote a novel’s worth of them every month, I’d still most likely die before getting through them all.  I will admit that some of the ideas probably suck, but I think there are some that a good writer could make something of them.  I’ll just never get a chance to.  So, I give them to the world.  If you can make something of these, go right ahead.  And if these are the ideas I’m giving away, maybe check out the ones I keep.

These are just some quick ideas that could be turned into TV shows.

First Idea – Fantasy cop show

I believe I was watching a not so great movie when this cliché scene happened.  Basically, the bad guy killed the good cop’s wife, or kid, I can’t remember, and the good cop catches up to them and starts beating the crap out of them.  Then his partner shows up and stops them saying something along the lines of, “Killing them won’t bring her back.” But then I thought, what if it could?

The idea is that in a present day world with magic, if someone is murdered they don’t bury the body right away.  They put some special two-part bracelet, or something, on the body and then store it.  If they catch the murderer, they put one of the bracelet parts on them and then execute them with a special spell.  The murderer dies, but their lifeforce resurrects their victim.  And in a world with such magic, they also have truth serum, so they know for certain who all this person murdered and they can bring all their victims back.  If the murderer dies before they can be found, the bracelets disintegrate and they bury the body like normal.

The story begins with them executing someone – who confessed with truth serum – but instead of resurrecting the victim the victim’s body explodes because they executed the wrong person.  This causes concern.  In the original version, the magic world was secret and separate from the real world, and a magic detective gets the help of a regular detective to find out how to get around all the magic.  And along the way they discover some dark plot, and probably have a romance. 

But that seemed too … normal.  So the revised version is that the world is all magic, but the cop goes to a “fantasy” writer – which in this world would be someone who wrote stories about worlds where magic doesn’t exist – to help solve the case.

Second Idea – Superhero comedy

This started with a post on Facebook asking how you would explain to the insurance agency if the Hulk smashed your car.  After hammering some ideas out, I came up with this comedy.  In this world, there are two big cities each with their own batches of superheroes and supervillains.  They are a hundred or so miles apart, and practically in-between them is this small town of maybe a hundred people: Main Street is basically just one block.  On this block there is a small law office, an insurance agency, a hair salon, a pizza joint, and a couple other things.  The stories would be about these regular people living in such a strange world, like the roof of the hair salon was damaged by some villains battle drone, but the insurance company is being a pain about getting it fixed.

Every time one of the supervillains tries to expand their territory to the next city, they basically go through, over, or under this town.  And then all the superheroes follow.  Maybe the speedster in this world has an understanding with the pizza joint to keep a pizza on a certain shelf in the refrigerator for them.  When the speedster has to run to the other city – maybe once a week or so – they make a quick stop to grab the pizza and leave a $20.  They then use their “friction power” or whatever to reheat it.

I was thinking one of the storylines would be this “crazy” guy who blames everything on supervillains.  He gets a flat tire and goes into the insurance agency with some outlandish story to try to collect from the fund set up to pay for all the damage done by supervillains.  The twist would be that while 99% of his claims are just delusions, he’s actually right about some. 

Another possible storyline would be a very minor villain would be sent to work undercover at the pizza shop.  Meanwhile, a very minor hero would be sent to work undercover at the law office, or wherever.  The two start dating, not knowing they’re working against each other.  And maybe to do something different, the hero joins the dark side for love.

Third Idea – Fantasy show

The show would begin with a ten year old kid getting out of a city school with his friends.  They start walking along, but then he gets an odd feeling and looks across the street.  There he sees a woman who smiles at him, but then turns and leaves. 

Fifteen or so years later, he’s in a bar when the same woman walks up to him.  But this time he’s too drunk to get any odd feelings.  She asks if he wants to go outside, and he agrees.  They step into an alley and he starts to undo his belt, but she stabs him.  

He dies, but then gets back up, instantly sober.  He asks what the hell, and she starts to explain that he’s an immortal.  Immortals can sense one another, but they are very few.  In olden days, it was likely an immortal would “die” long before they met another.  But nowadays, it’s really easy for an immortal to go around standing before schools to see if any of the kids are immortals.  That’s the woman’s job.  She found him, and just waited until he was an adult to “kill” him.  This stops him from aging, as well as being a very effective way of showing that he is an immortal.

Immortals can really die, but it takes something like being drawn and quartered.  Which was actually a method used by immortals to execute some of their members in the past, but then normal humans found out about it and thought it really cool. 

With the current population, there’s maybe an immortal born every year.  This has led to some issues in the immortal community.  Most immortals are content to amass some wealth and then live comfortably in the shadows, which has worked for centuries.  But as there are more immortals in the world, and it’s becoming harder to live in the shadows, a second faction has emerged that think they should rule over normal humans.  That leader may have been someone who was repeatedly burned at the stake, so they have a dim view of normal humans.  The two groups are more like political parties than warring factions.  The idea would be that neither side is fully correct, but that each have their pros and cons.

The woman works for the first group, and the story would be her bringing the guy into their world.  Part of her job is finding new immortals, but she also works to try to bring immortals from the other side over.  So it’s a world full of spies and secret agents.   

Fourth Idea – A companion show to the third idea

Basically, this show would cover the same time period and many of the same events, but from the POV of the other group of immortals.  Each show would be self-contained, and show their side as the right ones, but you’d get a clearer picture if you watched both. 

The idea I had would be the main character of this show would be an agent who keeps tabs on the woman immortal in the other show.  Like, he was on the roof of the building across the street watching her stab the newbie in the alley.  Maybe they were a couple two hundred years ago, but it didn’t end well.